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Rob Maille is Head of Strategy and Customer Experience at CommerceCX, as well as one of the co-founders. Rob is a seasoned entrepreneur and CX expert with over 25 years in digital strategy, enterprise application development and user experience. He has been creating easy to use, customer- driven solutions that customer’s love since 1991. Rob’s primary role at CommerceCX is to inspire, create, and define digital solutions for clients. He is an accomplished designer, technologist and thought leader with a focus around digital applications, product strategy and process enhancement. He possesses extensive subject matter experience in financial services, human resources, digital commerce, startups, insurance and healthcare, with a focus in creating high-performing teams focused on delivering creative products.

Rob Maille, Head of Strategy and Customer Experience at CommerceCX predicts four ways that will ultimately help organizations focus on the complete customer journey and enable frictionless customer experiences in 2019.

As we approach 2019, organizations will remain hyper-focused on supporting and embracing their customer experience. To do this, they must no longer view the buying, selling and servicing cycles as a set of linear disconnected events, and instead they will need to start thinking of the entire process as a customer journey. This is what we call a commerce ecosystem and is truly the pinnacle of the digital transformation.

Here are four predictions of what we can expect to see in the coming year that will ultimately help organizations focus on the complete customer journey and enable frictionless customer experiences.

A renewed focus on value to provide more meaningful customer journeys

Value will become the keyword as organizations begin to realize that the simple action of just moving everything to digital does not translate into value to the business and their customers. The reason? Value comes from removing friction and enhancing the real value of the service – not just making everything self-service.

The focus on value changes all that. In 2019, we will see more organizations conducting more user research including “Day in the Life” studies so that they have more meaningful customer journeys. From these customer journeys, companies will take a closer look at people, process and tools that do not align with value and remove or change them.

Leveraging automation to reduce cognitive load

In 2019, we can expect to see even more widespread introduction of software robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as organizations look to leverage automation as they enhance their overall commerce ecosystem.

The key word is cognitive load and how do companies reduce it by providing better guidance and overall automation that helps make it easier to use. RPA (Robotic process automation) is a great example of this and is an area that will continue to heat up. As we move into 2019, RPA will become even more disruptive in how industries like retail, manufacturing, supply chain and even finance operate from the ground up.

Blockchain – the “ledger of things”

As IOT becomes more integrated into digital solutions, blockchain will become the “ledger of things.” We will see more and more industries discover how blockchain can ensure the integrity and security of information between systems.

Quote-to-Cash (QTC)

2019 will be a big year for QTC. The elements that make up QTC will get baked into full cloud experiences targeted at a specific industry. It will become easier to deploy technologies like CPQ and CLM more effectivity. Also, consolidation in the market will create a richer set of offerings. Those on the sideline will enter in a big way.